Pisciculture Buisson

One of the perks of working for The Low Down to Hull and Back News, back in 1987, was that I got to cover a lot of the Outaouais region of Québec. The small newspaper was, after all, one that covered the area from Low, down to Hull (now incorporated into the city of Gatineau), and back.

We covered more than that area, actually. I once drove as far north as Gracefield, which is about an hour north of Wakefield, to Mont Ste. Marie, the ski resort, and once to a little village called Denholm, where the drive home, afterwards, nearly cost me my life.

I'll save that story for another time.

In the few months that I stayed with the paper (I quit over a difference of viewpoints with the owner and publisher), I got to see some pretty remote areas of this beautiful region of Québec. And I met some interesting people.

One such person was a young man, in Val-des-Bois, who opened a fish farm, Pisciculture Buisson. I was sent to interview him and take some pictures for the newspaper. And, unfortunately, I now forget his first name.

But he was very enthusiastic about this new venture, where he had created ponds for farming the fish, as well as having a natural pond in which the public could come and catch the fish for themselves. This owner—or one of his family members—would weigh the caught fish and charge accordingly.

As this pisciculture owner showed me the grounds and pulled up some of the fish in his farming pools, his wife fried up some fresh trout for me to sample and I still remember how wonderful it tasted all these decades later.

Perhaps my memory of this fish farm would have escaped me, years ago, had it not been for me keeping the photos that ended up in that edition of The Low Down. On the back of these photos, I had written the cut line that would accompany the photo and my story in the printed copy.

Our publisher, Art Mantell, jotted instructions for the printer about the page on which the photos were to appear and their size. This story went on page 5 of that week's edition and the photos spanned two and three columns.

There were the breaking-news stories that would sometimes hit the paper but I found the community stories were what held the paper together. As I look at many of the photos that I kept from my time at The Low Down, I see that the vast majority of them were about the people that made up this part of the Outaouais region.

I'll share more of these photos and the story behind them in the weeks ahead. Happy Thursday!